Banducci was born in 1922 in Bakersfield, California. He came to San Francisco at age 13 to study under the concertmaster of the San Francisco Symphony. He changed his first name to "Enrico" after Enrico Caruso. He was married five times, the first to Raimonde Verney, daughter of a symphony violinist. He began wearing a beret after a health inspector insisted he cover his hair while running a food operation, and continued the practice to hide his eventual baldness. He bought the hungry i for $800 in borrowed money in 1948. Although he once calculated that he made over $10 million from his various projects, he spent it all on his lavish lifestyle. He spent time in jail, and was involved in a number of brawls. The hungry i went bankrupt at least once.

In 1988, after he lost Enrico's to one of its several closures over the years, he became a hot dog vendor in Richmond, Virginia, at the "hungry i hot dog stand," located on very expensive property in the city's most upscale restaurant district that he'd purchased for his son years earlier; he moved back to San Francisco in the late 1990s.[2]

Banducci died in his sleep in South San Francisco, California at the age of 85.[4]